


Falling in a Forest

by apocalypseanna



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Ghost Evan Hansen, POV Multiple, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, but you can start on chapter two, chapter one has a very heavy suicide warning and is kind of gory, chapter one is more of a prologue, connor is the only one who can see evan, ghost au, ghost!evan, reverse au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-12-17 11:59:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11851125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apocalypseanna/pseuds/apocalypseanna
Summary: Evan didn't fall from the 40 foot oak, he jumped. And it very nearly worked. But some things are more difficult to kill than bodies, and some things last beyond death. Now Evan is stuck on Earth, forced to watch the consequences of his choice play out, and hoping that peace will come.Connor can see Evan, Jared can't.





	1. Jump

He didn’t fall, he jumped. He was high in the air, perched in the crook of a hundred year old oak tree that had stretched its thick brown branches as far as they could go, and the sun was setting over the state park. And he was alone. He had always been alone, always told himself it was better off this way, that he liked having the time to himself, but all he really wanted was for someone else to be there for him. Now, he was alone.  
The breeze was blowing softly on his skin, and he thought, not for the first time, that this was worth living for. The smell of sap and dirt and fading sunshine passing him by, the wind running through his hair, his fingers pressed against hard bark. Yes, it was worth living for. But it would also be a nice way to die. He was so high in the air, forty feet at least, and the world was smaller up here. He could see the tops of other trees in the distance, see the meadow below where he would land if he jumped, see the twilight seeping into the robin’s egg sky. For a moment, he closed his eyes and sky filled his vision, the clearest of blues on a cloudless day. It was a calming image. Up here, Evan would never be anxious. He would never stumble on his words or question what to say, because there was nothing that needed saying. The trees spoke for themselves. It was better, he decided, to die here where he was free and whole, than to die on the ground, hating himself, his last words a stammered out apology or a mistake. Evan opened his eyes, and saw the earth burning pale yellow and pink and gold. And then he jumped.  
The wind whistled through his ears as he fell, the glorious last moments when he was falling and had not hit the ground yet. They whispered him secrets, of love and of loneliness, and he held them close, but they were not his to keep and soon he had to let them go. His life did not flash before his eyes, but he saw her face, the little closed eye smile that she did when she played her guitar, the way she would march on the way to class with her chin tucked beneath her books, her hair rushing out behind her. The world hurtled past him, but he was not afraid. Beauty would not die with him. The sun would rise again.  
Then he hit the ground. If there was pain, he did not feel it. He was dead on impact.  
Slowly, the sky became a uniform shade. In the forest, creatures began to stir and move about on silent padded paws. A fox entered the meadow, nose pressed to the grass and ears forward. Cautiously, it licked the blood that littered the ground. It was thick and salty, and had not yet lost the warmth of bloodflow. The fox lapped it up in earnest. Then, a sound from the forest and the fox froze in its place. It waited a moment or two, ears perked towards the woods, before scampering away across the rest of the meadow. The body was alone again.  
Stars moved in the darkness above. It was the end of July, and Mars was beginning to come into view in the sky, polluted as it was. The orange dot hung there, practically invisible to the naked eye, until a cloud came in from the west and covered it up. Somewhere deep in the forest, a small silvery thing crawled out of the body of an elk, and released up into the sky until it was no more than a memory, and then kept moving away until even the memory was gone. There was a breeze coming from somewhere warm and damp.  
A phone was buzzing in the Junior Ranger’s locker room, tucked away in an old black bookbag that smelled like peanut butter. It buzzed for fifteen, thirty, sixty seconds before it stopped, and then minutes later it buzzed once more. And then again, again, again. The room was empty, as was the rest of the lodge, and there was no one to hear it, no one to answer it. Eventually, it died.  
The body on the ground in the meadow beneath the old oak was broken, and bloody, but it was still Evan Hansen. Somewhere deep inside the no-longer-functioning systems in his body, curled up beneath unfired neurons in his grey matter or sleeping in between cracked vertebrae, was his soul. And that had not died. It was simply waiting, biding its time before emerging from the place it had been tethered to for the past 17 years. The body was still warm, and it could provide a perfectly fine home for a frightened soul. But time was running out.  
Rigor mortis had set in, and the body was as stiff as a tombstone. Between the heat and the broken flesh, it would begin to smell very soon if it did not already. There were animals in the forest, bigger and hungrier than the fox and they would come out when it did, and tear into their free meal. It would not be a very fine home for a soul then.  
But there was something else, too. As the sun burst over the rows of trees, a woman was driving into Ellison State Park. She was the source of the 50-odd messages that had been sent to the phone in Evan’s locker over the past few hours, and she had not slept that night. Heidi pulled the battered baby blue minivan into the parking lot of the Ranger Center, and though she was not a religious woman she murmured a prayer to herself. Very soon, she would be combing through the forest, perhaps with the kind of dogs that would easily be able to discover a missing person. Although she did not yet know it, her prayer would be answered. She would find her son. But she would not find him alive.  
That was what Evan Hansen’s soul feared most of all, and so it loosened itself from the place where it had been hiding. It uncoiled itself slowly and then exited Evan’s body in a nearly invisible stream. For a moment, it hung in the cool morning air, like mist off the mountains. Then it began to rise. The soul rose higher and higher in the air until it seemed to be at the cusp of the Earth’s atmosphere—and then it stopped. It shimmered there, at the edge of the world, and then it shot back down to the meadow beneath. And then, suddenly, Evan Hansen woke up.

Something was wrong. He couldn’t say what it was, but he felt wrong—like a popped balloon, or a vat of liquid nitrogen that had been suddenly dumped into of boiling water. It was unsettling, but then Evan could deal with unsettling. That was one of Jared’s favorite words for him, after all. He brushed away the uneasiness and stood up. The sun was rising. It smeared the horizon with warmth, creamy reds and oil-slick yellows and the tiniest of pinks. It was beautiful, but something was off about it. Like it was something he shouldn’t be seeing.  
He saw it, then, lowering his eyes from the sky for a moment to examine his surroundings. And then he remembered everything. His first instinct was to run, to scream, to throw up. He nearly did throw up, but that is not so easy when you are a ghost. He stared at it in horror, his own corpse, his own glassy eyes reflecting the fading sky above them. There was no scream in his lips, no fear in his face. Just a body that would never be put together again.  
Evan, the Evan that was still thinking and seeing and moving, came closer slowly, unable to take his eyes off his body. He reached out to touch it, to see if it was real, and his hand passed right through. He scrambled backwards then, staring at his own hand as if it terrified him. He pinched himself, and felt nothing.  
“Oh god,” he said. “Oh my god oh my god oh my god.” The events of last night had seemed almost like a dream, but now it was all real and he was dead. He was actually dead. And worse, he was still here, the same place he had always been, just now without the benefit of being able to touch or feel things.  
He paced around in a circle, there beneath the oak tree, thinking.  
“I’m a ghost,” he said out loud. “Which obviously isn’t the ideal situation to be in right now but since my body is out of commission it seems unlikely that I’m going to Jesus up and come back to life, so I need to deal with it.” He thought about Dr. Sherman, who had always tried to make him think more positive thoughts. “Okay,” he said. “I’m a ghost. But there’s got to be some good things, right? Like, like maybe now I don’t need to order pizza on the phone anymore because I can’t eat. Pizza. Ever again.” He shook his head as if it was an Etch-A-Sketch he needed to erase. “No, not a good example. Um, how about I could just sit and look at the sky and the trees and stuff and never have to talk to anyone again?” It wasn’t the worst idea. But then he remembered the big gaping pit in his stomach where the loneliness lived, and his heart sank. “Oh my God,” he said. “I’m dead.”  
He slid down against the tree, head in his hands. For a moment, he was frozen there, in tableau. Then he fell through the tree and landed inside the trunk. Evan didn’t fight it. There, nobody could see him cry.  
The park ranger stomped through the dewy underbrush, wishing more than anything that he was back inside the cabin with his cup of coffee and his Facebook feed. The crazy lady trailed behind him, struggling to keep up as weeds whipped at her bell bottom jeans and faded sneakers. Her phone was clutched at her chest, volume up all the way in case she ran into a patch of cell service.  
“You’re sure this is the right way?” She asked. “Shouldn’t we have stayed on the trail?”  
“It’s the fastest way to the sector where your son was working. That trail works around another mile or so before it reaches the meadow.”  
“Okay,” said Heidi Hansen, hesitantly. “The woman on the phone said that he didn’t clock out last night? So that means he’s definitely still there?”  
“If he’s anywhere in the forest, it’ll be in that meadow. But like I said, people forget to clock out all the time. I really wouldn’t worry.”  
Heidi did not look any less worried. If anything, the worry lines in her face had deepened, since she had come home to discover that her son was missing.  
“Thank you, again. I know that this seems like an overreaction, but Evan’s never done anything like this before.”  
The park ranger grunted, and pushed aside a few branches.  
“This is the meadow,” he said. “Everything looks totally—”  
Heidi stopped breathing. “What is that?” she asked, pointing to the red smear at the top of the hill, a blue polo just barely visible.  
“I—I don’t know, but—”  
Evan’s mother was already moving, running away from the line of trees and towards the limp shape on the ground. When it came into full view, she stopped. Her phone fell to the bloody grass.  
“Evan?” She said, as though he could hear. “Evan? Evan!”  
He got out of the tree then.  
“Mom?” He asked. She did not hear.  
Heidi screamed with pain or with shock, and fell on the body, clutching it tightly in her arms.   
She howled with pain, gasping sobs that echoed through the meadow and etched themselves into every blade of grass. Evan’s body was in her arms, and she was clutching him to her like she would not be able to live if he let go.  
“Mom,” Evan said again, quieter this time. He wanted to go to her, to comfort her, but his fingers passed right through her. “Mom…” She buried her face in his collapsed chest.  
“Mom, it’s okay. I’m okay. I’m right here, Mom, you see? I’m just fine. Everything’s fine Mom. I’m right here. Don’t you see me Mom? Please, Mom, I need you to see me…”  
She didn’t.  
The park ranger watched from a few feet away, unsure what to do. He had never seen a human corpse before, never in his 19 years working there, and it disturbed him more than he had ever thought it would. Eventually, he came to his senses and sent out a call for help. But he still couldn’t tear his eyes away from the 17-year-old’s bloody body. When the other rangers came, it was almost a relief.  
“O’Connor?” one of them asked, and he turned away at last, grateful for the excuse.  
“He must have fallen out of the tree,” the park ranger responded. “It’s not pretty. I—” He held up a finger and then promptly went to throw up in the underbrush.   
The other rangers closed in on the hill. Some of them removed their hats as they saw Heidi gripping the contorted body. It was almost a beautiful image, mother and son against the ancient oak tree as the pale sky lightened above them. What none of them saw was Evan standing alone, crying without words as his mother mourned him.  
“Ma’am?” One of the park rangers asked softly, after a minute or so had passed. “We need to take away the body.”  
Heidi lifted her head slowly, blinking as she took in the rangers around her. “O—of course,” she said, her voice quivering slightly. “I just want to—to say goodbye.”  
“Take all the time you need,” the park ranger responded. He shifted the weight on the balls of his feet, and averted his glance.  
Heidi kissed Evan’s body on the forehead, and her eyes began to well up again. “I love you,” she said. “I am not going to stop loving you. I promise.”  
The ghost came over to where she was kneeling and bent down to face her. “I love you too Mom,” he said. “I love you so much.” And then they took his body away on a stretcher, and she got up and followed it. And he was alone.


	2. Free Falling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's the first day of Connor Murphy's senior year, but somehow he's not thrilled. For one thing, there's the pill bottles burning a hole in the back of his dresser. And for another, there's the boy he met in the hallway who turned out to be dead. Things aren't going well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahh sorry it took so long to update this! Trigger warnings for this chapter are suicide, and there's a mention of self harm.

Connor Murphy was perched on the side of his bed, like a strange black bird ready to take off and fly into the ceiling fan above. There was a joint in his hand, and he sucked at it slowly, absentmindedly, not ever taking his eyes off of the beat up wooden dresser across from him. It was deep mahogany and had once been a beautiful piece of woodwork, before years of childhood use and teenage misuse had taken away whatever value had been there. However, the dresser itself wasn’t what concerned Connor, although part of him wondered absently what would happen to it if he died. It was what it contained, rolled up in some pairs of old socks which he had shoved to the deepest depths of the second drawer down: 5 pill bottles, caution-sign orange, each containing about a dozen small white capsules. Connor had discovered them the day before, hidden in the very back of the medicine cabinet, ancient relics of various surgeries and sleeping problems by his parents. They were all expired or forgotten, but washed down with some Absolut from his closet, they would still be able to get the job done. Or so Connor hoped.

His third alarm went off, and he stopped it before the second beep. Outside the sky was getting too light for comfort and he let out a deep sigh, exhaling the last of the weed. He extinguished the joint and then kicked it under the bed, where a small graveyard of identically gnarled ends awaited.

He rose from the bed, finally, and stretched like a cat waking from a nap. The jacket was waiting on a hook by the door and he pulled it on, noticing with satisfaction the way it was molded to his body, all the faded spots and little scratch marks and burns. He looked back at the dresser one last time, and his face had something like longing in it. Then he walked out of the room and closed the door with a bang.

In the dining room, his parents were fighting over something or other, and he put his head down on the table, wishing he hadn’t broken his headphones.

“Larry, we talked about this, I need—Connor, aren’t you going to eat anything?”

“Not hungry,” he said from within the cocoon of his arms.

“Connor, it’s the first day of school. You have to eat _something._ ”

“I’m not going.”

He heard the orange juice pitcher being put down on the table. “What?” There wasn’t surprise in Cynthia’s voice, just irritation.

“I don’t feel like it today. I’ll go tomorrow.”

“It’s your senior year Connor. You can’t miss the first day.”

“I already said I’ll go tomorrow! I’m trying to find a compromise here.”

“Larry, a little help here?”

His father looked up from his laptop for a moment, his typically self-satisfied face trying to look concerned as he scrambled to figure out what he missed. Connor wished he could punch him.

“Go to school Connor,” was his one piece of sparkling wisdom.

Connor put his head back down.

This was the way of the dining room—a battlefield carried out by the one and only Cynthia Murphy, fighting a war no one else cared about. She was trying so badly to keep the family together, but she had led the horses to water and they had kicked shit in her face for it. Sometimes Connor pitied her, but then he realized, as he had again and again, that the unity bid was just a farce. All she really cared about was control. And so he kept his mouth shut.

In the end, he wound up at school anyway.

It was an ugly, squat building, sprawled out over a couple of acres of farmland that the school district had bought a hundred years ago and then slapped a few walls on. The whole place had a faint odor of mold and disinfectant about it, as though the bricks themselves were rotting and all the janitors could do was spray Clorox on it. Most of the students avoided spending any time there that they didn’t have to, but the sagging shifting place left a damper on their spirit they couldn’t ever seem to shake. Connor was no different.

He placed a hand on the rusty back door as it closed, keeping it from making any sound and alerting the gym classes on the other side of the wall to his presence. He liked to come in this way, through the back of the school where nobody would be expecting him. It let him transition more slowly, wading into the depths of the school instead of being plunged into the flow of sweaty bodies all pushing to get in the main entrance. And besides, here he wasn't expected to go to class. There had been days where he just lay here on the torn old gymnastics mats, listening to the buzz of gym classes and drifting off into dreams of a better place. But he couldn't spend the last first day in this awful place with the deflated basketballs and the cracked hula hoops and the rats. He just paused for a moment, looking at the messy piles of discarded gym equipment, and then opened the door to the hallway and lurched out. And nearly ran into Jared Kleinman.

Jared’s eyes were red and he was sniffling slightly, but when he saw Connor he stopped immediately.

"Hey Connor," he said, and he still sounded like an asshole. "Loving the new hair length. Very school shooter chic."

Connor looked at him, and the anger began to brew beneath the surface, like bubbles forming in the bottom of a pot of hot water. This was why he hated school, why he hated his life, hated everyone who wasn't himself, and half the time hated himself too. Because everyone hated him. "It was a joke," Jared said, not unkindly, but Connor didn't notice the softer quality in his voice.

"Oh no, it's funny. I'm laughing," he said, and the bitterness must have come through in his voice because Jared just shook his head and walked into the gym closet.

If Connor was curious at all about what he was doing in there, he didn't dwell on it very long. His brain was still doused in the dim red curtain of his anger, over Jared for the stupid insult, and over himself for falling for such an easy trap. He walked through the empty linoleum halls, willing himself to get lost in the place he knew so well. Beneath his feet, the green and white tiles flashed by, each one scratched and stained to hell. Jared was just an asshole, but he was indicative of a larger problem. Connor was friendless, the outcast that no one dared even to approach, let alone consider a human with feelings.

His anger got away from him, yes. He remembered the printer incident so clearly, the waves that had slammed into his body, urging him to just let it all out. Mrs. Stenberg had picked Alana for line leader, even though she’d picked Alana every day that week and it had been months since Connor had been line leader. Didn’t he deserve a chance? Didn’t anyone else? Really, he was just fighting for justice and freedom for everyone. He just…lost control sometimes. And no one seemed to understand that.

Connor had learned to deal with the loneliness that had lodged itself in his throat, like a bone he was constantly choking on. If he ignored it, just kept his head down and his mind sedated, it almost didn’t hurt anymore. But sometimes, he would see a group of people talking in the hallway, or his sister walking by with her friends, and it would all come over him like new. He was alone.

It was at that point that Connor looked up from the ground for the first time and noticed that the hallway was completely deserted. There wasn’t a single other person around him or anywhere further down the hall. He felt a sense of total confusion, like he had suddenly woken up in an unfamiliar place with no idea who he was. Was it a Saturday? Was there an evacuation he had missed? Had the school suddenly all been abducted?

He walked back down the hall the way he had come, and spotted someone walking around the corner.

“Hey!” he shouted, and the person turned.

“M—me?” the stranger asked. He had a long face with dark eyebrows and dirty blonde hair, and he wore a rumpled blue polo with dark stripes. Connor vaguely recognized him, but couldn’t quite remember his name.

“Who else would I be talking to?”

The boy stammered out a nonsense reply. He was looking at Connor with wide eyes that seemed to convey fear, or was it excitement?

“Uh, where is everyone?” Connor asked.

“They’re all at the, uh, the assembly? In the gym? You know, the uh, memorial? Assembly?”

“Why aren’t you there?”

His face paled, which was quite an accomplishment because he already looked like a corpse. “I—I—I’m, uh, going… to the bathroom?”

It was obviously a lie, but Connor decided not to push it. He’d done his fair share of skipping out on mandatory assemblies, and this kid seemed pretty nervous already.

“Oh. Okay. Thanks. For the help.”

Connor turned to leave, and then suddenly remembered the name which had been on the tip of his tongue. “You’re Evan, right? Evan Hansen?”

Evan nodded. “I—I’m—uh, yeah. I’m Evan. And you’re Connor. Uh, right?”

“Yeah, I’m Connor.” The two of them stood there for a moment and the awkwardness hung in the air between them. Then Connor turned and walked away.

The assembly was about halfway through when Connor slipped in the door. He wasn't quite sure why he had come here instead of enjoying the free pass to skip but there was something about the empty halls and Evan Hansen haunting them that disturbed him in ways he didn't quite understand.

Alana Beck was up on the floor of the gym, wearing a jean jacket and a floral skirt, and was blabbing into the mic about god knows what.

"We had a lot of classes together. I think, there was History freshman year, and Gym even though I usually didn’t see him very much in that class. Then, sophomore year we definitely had Spanish and Chemistry together, and we might have had English together. Oh, and last year there was APUSH, APES, Calc, and Journalism. I would definitely consider him one of my closest acquaintances. Which is why it’s just so awful that all of this happened. It’s just like, one minute he was here, and now he’s gone. I just can’t believe that he’s not going to ever come back. It’s such a terrible tragedy."

Did someone die? Connor looked around the room, trying to gauge by people's expressions what was going on. Most people just looked bored. Actually, there was one woman by the stage—a blonde woman who Connor had never seen before—who looked like she was bawling her eyes out. But not much other than that.

Up on the makeshift stage, the principal took over the mic.

"Thank you Alana," he said. "What a lovely tribute. Would anyone else like to share?" He craned his neck to look around at the crowd, eyes moving slowly up and down the rows and rows of bleachers. No hands were raised. "All right. Then we'll move on with the program. In memory of Evan, the district has decided to dedicate a bench in the courtyard to his memory."

On the screen behind him, an image of a bench appeared, with the words "In Memory of Evan Hansen" on it. Connor felt a jolt run through his heart.

"Does that say Evan Hansen?" He asked the girl next to him, who was slumped down with her phone between her legs.

"Huh?" She asked, then looked up at the projection. "Oh. Yeah."

"What happened to him?"

"Uh, he fell out of a tree or something. I'm not sure."

"But he died?"

"Yeah, he died." The girl gave him a sideways glance, then resumed scrolling in between two fishnet enclosed legs.

Connor tried to calm himself down. It couldn't have been Evan he saw in the hallway. Maybe it was a drug induced hallucination. Maybe he'd finally gone off the deep end and imagined the whole thing. But it had felt so real. Connor could picture him exactly, posed right in front of the water fountain with his hands nervously clutching the bottom of his shirt. It had just happened. How could he be dead?

"Let us observe one final moment of silence for Evan," said the principal, and the image changed once again. It was a picture of Evan, and it was definitely the same person Connor had just seen. He was even wearing the same shirt. Connor hit his face with the palm of his hand a few times, as if it would reset his brain and make everything okay again. But when he looked up, he saw Evan standing right in front of him. It was as if he had walked right through the door, and for all Connor knew, he had. He was a few feet away from where Connor sat, looking around at the silent auditorium with wide, wavering eyes that looked like matching ponds sitting in the center of his face.

Connor just stared at him, wondering how in the hell no one else could see this. Evan wasn't even hiding, just standing in the middle of the auditorium right next to the blown up picture of his face. He couldn't have been more obvious if he had a giant sign that said "I'm Evan Hansen and I'm dead!" But no one even glanced his way.

The moment of silence ended, and the low buzz of chatter began to fill the auditorium again.

"Moving on," the principal said, and Evan walked through the closed double doors. Right through, as if they were nothing. It was all Connor could do to keep his mouth from dropping open.

When the assembly finally ended, Connor was the first one out the door. He searched every corner of the school for the strange ghostly boy. But Evan was gone.

 

That night, Larry and Cynthia argued at dinner. Larry had stayed at work late again, leaving Zoe stranded at soccer practice, and Cynthia was furious. She screamed at him over the spinach pilaf that he was worthless, that he didn’t care about his children, and that he never understood that she had a life too. Larry yelled that he was the only one in this family who actually worked to support it, that Cynthia had one job that she couldn’t even do right, that he had only worked late to support Zoe’s jazz band trip and Cynthia couldn’t even do that. And Zoe just sat there, staring at her plate and not saying a word. Connor couldn’t take it.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" He asked, slamming hands on the table. "You pretend you’re this perfect happy family but you can’t fucking stand each other! Why can’t you just get a divorce already and save us the trouble? Or maybe pay attention to other people for once in your lives instead of your own idiotic problems? Jesus fucking Christ! Wake up!”

He hadn’t even been able to look at their stupidly shocked faces, just shoved the table towards them, taking some enjoyment in the sound of shattering dishes, and then stormed up to his room. He stayed there, pacing back and forth and shaking with anger, for twenty minutes before tiring himself out. And then the guilt slammed into him like a freight train.

It truly was a vicious cycle. There was the anger, so searing and all-consuming that he couldn’t see anything else, and then the guilt that drowned him and soaked his lungs and eyes with regret. Then, the hatred. He hated himself so truly, so completely in those moments that he would scratch at his chest for hours hoping that it would let him escape from himself. Finally, anger rose within him again, anger at himself. He was angry that he did these things over and over again, that he lost control, that he could never fix himself no matter how hard he tried. And this anger only began the cycle over again. It never stopped. All it did was sink him deeper and deeper into exhaustion.

Connor was so tired. He was tired of fucking up his life, he was tired of hating himself, he was tired of being angry about everything. He just wanted the cycle to end, but he knew that as long as he lived he would never be fixed. He stared down at the first pill bottle and saw the name on the label, LARRY MURPHY, CHRONIC PAIN. Connor began unscrewing the top, wishing he could fast forward to the part where the rest of the world faded away into nothingness. And then he heard a voice from behind him.

"Connor?" Someone asked. Connor froze.

Evan Hansen was standing at the foot of his bed.

"I—I don't understand," he said. "I was in my room..."

Connor just stared at him. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

“I’m a g-ghost I think?”

“I’m hallucinating,” Connor sighed, and turned away. He shook out the bottle into his hand.

“W—wait! What are you doing?”

Connor ignored him. He tilted his head back, and lifted his hand.

“Stop!” Evan grabbed his wrist, and Connor felt freezing fingers grip his skin. Then his arm turned to nothingness. It was as though all the weight had left it and the only thing that remained was the image of a jacket clad arm and a cold feeling where the real thing had been. The pills fell through his skin and tumbled to the floor.

“What the fuck?” Connor asked, and there was an edge to his voice as anger rose up to hide the panic and shock. “What did you fucking do?”

Evan winced with his whole body, like a turtle discovering that its shell had disappeared. “I—I don’t know, I s-swear I d-don’t know, that n-never happened b-before, I d-didn’t think I c-could touch anything, I’m so s-sorry C-Connor I d-didn’t know.”

Connor looked down at his arm with wide eyes. He ran his other hand through it, and it felt like touching nothing.

“Oh my God,” he said. “It’s fucking gone. My whole fucking arm.”

“I j-just—I didn’t want y-you to hurt y-yourself.” Evan wrung out the hem of his shirt with his hands.

“Great fucking job!”

“I’m s-sorry!”

Connor trembled with anger and shoved at Evan, his ghostly arm making contact and pushing him down to the ground. However, his other arm went right through Evan’s body, and Connor lost his balance as well, falling on top of Evan. He scrambled up, as best he could with one functioning arm, and his face was redder than ever.

“Fuck!” He kicked at his bedpost and pounded on the mattress with his fist, like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Evan watched from the ground, paralyzed, his eyes wide. Finally, Connor collapsed onto the bed in a fetal position, body shuddering with sobs.

He was angry with no way to express his anger, and part of him was embarrassed, to be doing this private ritual in the presence of someone else. He wasn’t being logical, he knew, but he couldn’t stop either, and so he just lay there, furious and hating himself for it.

“C-Connor?” Evan asked after he’d been curled up on the bed for a small eternity.

“What?” His voice was sharper than he intended it to be, and he felt bad for it. “Sorry.”

“Uh, are you o-okay?”

“What does it fucking look like?” Connor’s eyes were red and his hair was wild and knotted, as though a small animal had been nesting there. He wasn’t as angry anymore, and another pang of guilt passed through him even as he spoke.

“T-that was a d-dumb question, I’m s-sorry I wasn’t thinking, I won’t ask again.”

Connor sighed. “It’s fine. I’m just…” out of control, mean-spirited, probably insane. “I have problems.” It was an understatement and he was sure they both knew it but he didn’t want to waste time explaining his fucked-up brain to the dead boy.

“I understand,” Evan said.

“Yeah, sure,” Connor muttered.

There was a beat, and then Evan said, “C-could I see your arm? I mean you d-don’t have to if you don’t want to but I’ll t-try not to do anything again, I j-just want to see it and m-maybe fix it or—”

Connor stuck out his arm. Evan moved closer to him and pressed his icy fingers on it again. Up close, Evan’s skin was pearlescent and tinged with blue, and it looked far less real than it had from far away. He was more like a statue than a person, and not a very sturdy one at that.

“So what happened to you?” Connor asked. “I mean, with the tree and everything…”

Evan looked up from Connor’s arm for a moment. “Oh. W-well. I climbed a t-tree, and then I f-fell out of it. That’s pretty much the w-whole thing, so… yeah.”

“Jesus.”

"It doesn't even really m-matter anyway," Evan said, like it was something he’d said a hundred times before. "B-because I'm dead now. And you can't take that back." He put down Connor’s arm almost forcefully. “I d-don’t know what I’m d-doing, I’m sorry. I t-think maybe it’s warmer. I d-don’t know.”

Connor moved his arm back and forth. The strange thing was that it did feel warmer, and maybe a little more solid.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Are you going to be—safe?” Evan blurted out. “I mean, a-are you going to t-try again?”

Connor shrugged. “Maybe.”

Evan looked worried. “You s-shouldn’t. I mean, you r-really shouldn’t.”

“As compelling as your argument is—”

“I’m n-not kidding Connor! I know b-better than anyone. It’s n-not worth it. W-whatever you th-think it’ll do f-for you, it’s not. Worth it. It’s c-cold, a-and no one c-can see you, and you c-can’t touch a-anything, and everything about it is so much w-worse! A-and what about your p-parents, and your s-sister?”

“They hate me,” Connor said quietly, remembering dinner.

“Even if they do, t-they don’t d-deserve to g-go through your death. And y-you d-don’t deserve it either.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“ _No_ _one_ d-deserves this,” Evan said. He was shaking like a leaf, and his skin was the color of ice. “J-just don’t Connor. P-please.”

Connor bit his lip and glanced towards the dresser drawer, even though the pills were no longer there. “How the fuck am I supposed to promise that? How am I supposed to keep going through this shit again and again?”

“J-just… not n-now. Promise you won’t k-kill yourself t-tonight.” Evan’s eyes were pleading, the circles beneath them the color of the last leaves of autumn. It was the deep purple of a dead organism sending out its last signals in a desperate attempt to save itself.

“Fine,” Connor said, and Evan sighed, his face calming down. Then, he vanished, just disappeared as though reality had suddenly glitched and kicked him out. All that was left where he had been standing was frayed grey carpet and a few small white pills.

“Evan?” Connor asked. Suddenly, he felt his arm coming back, bones and sinews and burning hot blood vessels that shot down from his shoulder and gave him pins and needles all over his body. When everything had solidified, Connor grasped his hand and stared at it in disbelief. It was as if nothing had ever happened. The birthmark near his thumb, the light freckles on the back of his hand, the scars on his wrist were all still exactly where they had been. He flexed his hand back and forth and let himself smile.

As Connor stared down at his wrist, the ghost of Evan Hansen watched helplessly, willing the living boy to see him standing there on the square of fraying gray carpet. But Connor ignored him.

The memory of the night was leaking out of Connor’s mind like sand through a broken hourglass, and it made him think that maybe he’d better lay off the weed for a while. What _had_ he been doing? It felt as though it was important, but he really couldn’t remember what the hell it had been. Maybe he’d been watching a TV show? He remembered something about a ghost, and he knew gotten pissed off for a while, so maybe it had been a particularly shitty episode of Paranormal Witness? He didn’t know. The only thing he knew for certain was that, for the first time in a long time, he didn’t want to kill himself. Not tonight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I think I'm going to go with a kind of anthology-ish style so prepare for more perspectives, whenever I get around to updating next. I start school in a week so it might be a while, sorry in advance. Also, if you comment I'll love you forever!


	3. Falling Apart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jared Kleinman is more upset than he likes to let on. And a psycho's rendering of his dead family friend isn't doing anything to help that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys sorry for the wait, I hope you like this chapter. It's really rushed because I needed to finish it up before school started but hopefully not too bad. Warning for mentions of death obviously. And I was kind of projecting onto Jared so his character might read different from what you're used to.

The cafeteria was a large room, eternally crowded, with round tables scattered about like spots on a strange tiled mushroom. Jared had never known it to be empty, even in the dead of night; it was a place that wasn’t meant for silence and space. Which was precisely why he liked it so much. It was like a huge human supermarket, where he could pick and choose who to sit with depending on the day and his mood. There were the theater kids, who were somehow more obnoxious than him, the band geeks, who managed to be even more obnoxious than the theater kids, the robotics nerds, who could benefit from a little obnoxiousness every now and then, and a hundred more offshoots of extracurriculars each with their own people and moods. Then there were the little groups merged by a single person—the Leah Brown group, which somehow managed to transmit nonstop streams of gossip 24/7; the Jose Garcia group, whose main identifying feature was talking shit about the Leah Brown group; and then of course the Alana Beck group, which seemed to only talk about the perfect way to get into college (although not a better college than Alana of course).

Jared passed all of these groups as he weaved through the maze of backpacks and legs searching for a table with an empty seat. In the end, he stopped in front of the acapella kids near the back of the room, who had lost a bunch of seniors the year before and hadn’t yet filled their spots. He nodded at their unofficial leader, Emma, and greeted everyone he knew at the table before asking if he could sit. Of course, they couldn't say no to the seemingly innocuous Jewish kid, and so he wound up eating his tater tots next to the "Idiosingcrasies" and trying his best to participate in conversation despite having watched only half of Pitch Perfect.

His heart wasn’t in it, though. Even surrounded by a half a dozen other people in a room full of hundreds, he still felt absolutely alone. There wasn’t a soul in the school who cared to hear what he had to say, or noticed him if he didn’t approach them. Not since…

The funeral had been almost a month ago, but Jared still couldn’t stop thinking about it. He dreamed about it sometimes—the onlookers standing around in groups like groves of strange black trees, the coffin glowing warm mahogany in the sunlight, the gravestone that suddenly made it all real. In the dream, he wasn’t sad but expectant, as though something important was about to happen just as long as he stood in front the grave long enough. But he always woke up before anything did.

Evan hadn’t even been his friend. That’s what he kept trying to tell himself. They’d known each other since infancy, but it wasn’t real friendship, just two people forced together who stuck around out of habit. Still, part of him couldn’t let go of Evan. Maybe it was because he’d seen the boy he’d spent his childhood with lying in a coffin with the back of his head stuffed and sewn back together. Or maybe, and he hated himself for thinking this, maybe it was because he realized he didn’t have a single friend without him.

Jared had always been the kind of person who could slip into stranger’s conversations and not be questioned for it, but hanging at the edges of other people’s pre-established friendships didn’t do anything to calm the constant knot of loneliness in the pit of his stomach. He needed that one person to return to, where he could always talk and know he was being heard, where he could be vital and not just an extra. Maybe it had been cruel, to profit off Evan’s friendlessness, but he relied on it to make him feel like he wasn’t totally alone. And now that was gone, and Jared found himself floating in a sea of people who would return his wave but never stop for a conversation, who could say his name but knew nothing about him, who could tolerate him but never accept him. And it royally sucked.

“Oh my God,” Emma was saying. “Look at Connor Murphy’s _hair._ ” Jared dutifully turned around and spotted Connor at the entrance to the cafeteria looking troubled and somewhat lost.

“He looks like he just stepped off the front cover of School Shooter Vogue,” he commented, and felt a familiar flicker of validation when the rest of the table laughed.

“I didn’t think he even knew where the cafeteria is,” one of the super-tenors, Brett, said.

“He’s coming towards us, shut the fuck up you guys,” giggled someone across the table from Jared.

Connor was indeed coming towards them, and his eyes were dead set on Jared. Jared’s heart began pounding and he wondered if maybe today was the day the weirdo would crack and finally get revenge for all the asshole comments over the years. He turned back towards the table quickly, ducking into his tray and keeping his eyes down, but it didn’t seem to work.

“Kleinman,” Connor said, and Jared froze. He made a _what?_ face to the rest of the table to indicate that he did not have any more idea what was going on than they did, and then turned around slowly.

“Yes?” He responded, trying to keep his tone casual.

“We, uh, we need to talk,” Connor said, glancing at the other people at the table who were all staring at him.

“And what you’re doing now is what? Glaring with a soundtrack?”

Connor grit his teeth, but impressively did nothing more. “Not _here_. Alone.”

“Look, much as I love—”

“About Evan.”

Jared’s blood froze.

“What?”

“Just come with me.” He sighed. “Please.”

Jared glanced back at the acapella kids, who were all making detailed notes in their heads as to how they’d relate this scene to their friends later, and then stood up.

“Fine,” he said. “But I have a rape whistle and I know how to use it.”

Connor looked briefly like he was considering murdering Jared and dumping him in a ditch off of I-91, then muttered “Come on,” and turned back around.

Jared followed, giving a last eyebrow raise to the people he’d been sitting with, who were already gossiping amongst themselves about him. Boy was this going to strike a blow to his meager reputation. Oh well. He could always claim he’d come out of pure curiosity and then make up some ridiculous story to satisfy people’s expectations.

Connor led him to the closet at the back of the gym, the narrow space where they kept the broken equipment. Jared felt a lump in his throat when he saw it. This had been where he’d fled to during the goddamn memorial assembly when his eyes started burning and he had to run out. The humiliation of it still stung if he thought about it.

“All right,” Connor said when they got inside, leaning against a pile of torn up gymnastics mats.

“You’re really not going to turn on a light? The least you could do is _act_ like this isn’t some kind of covert gay affair.”

Connor rolled his eyes and searched the room with his phone flashlight until he located an ancient light switch. The closet filled with dusty yellow light.

“So,” Connor began, and then stopped. He shifted his feet, looking deeply uncomfortable. “What— could you tell me about Evan?”

Jared blinked. “What?”

“I… want to know what he was like. Before… you know”

“What the fuck is going on right now? Am I hallucinating?”

“It’s not a hard question Kleinman,” Connor said, an edge returning to his voice.

“Pardon me for being surprised that you give a shit! Jesus. Why do you care anyway?”

“None of your business.”

“It kind of is!”

“I’m just… curious. It’s fucked up, that he died so young. I wish I could have, you know, gotten to know him.”

Jared looked at Connor strangely. The vulnerability was new. He wasn’t sure how to respond without deflecting, and he floundered for a minute before sputtering out— “Well why the fuck are you asking me?”

“Weren’t you friends?”

“Family friends,” he corrected automatically.

“It’s the same fucking thing.”

“It’s different. But… I guess I did know him pretty well.”

This was all wrong. Jared didn’t want to be thinking about this right now, and he didn’t want to be saying it out loud, especially not to Connor fucking Murphy. But he found the words spilling over his lips, and he couldn’t seem to keep them back.

“Evan was shy. I mean obviously, he had social anxiety, but even then, he was really fucking shy. And he loved trees. A lot. When we were kids we would go to the state park all the time, and he would always find the tallest ones and climb them. Which is why it’s just so _fucked_ that that’s how he died. Like, the thing he cared about more than anything and it just—”

Jared felt a lump forming in his throat and he grew red, cursing himself for going too far.

“Anyway. He was a total fucking nerd. Comics and everything. And he always got good grades and shit, because of course. If he got a B on a test he’d start freaking out and double checking all the answers to see if the teacher messed up grading it. He just got really worked up over everything, which was probably the anxiety. But also, that’s just Evan. Even when we were little, he would get worried about like worms on the sidewalk after the rain. He went around and picked them up whenever he saw one because he hated seeing them dry up and die. Stuff like that. He was a good person, in his soul or whatever. He didn’t like to see people hurting.”

Connor stared at him, eyebrows knit together, nodding slowly. It was impossible to tell what was going on in his brain, but it was giving Jared the heebie-jeebies.

“What the fuck are you looking at me like that for?”

“I’m just interested!”

“Why? Seriously, why? You never even spoke to Evan!”

“I…” Connor bit his lip and avoided Jared’s eye contact. “I’m not crazy.”

“Right, because that’s something sane people just like to say occasionally in case anyone forgets.”

Connor took a deep breath, then exhaled. “I saw him. Evan. After he died.”

Jared looked at him, dumbfounded. He couldn’t have made this shit up if he tried. “Excuse me?”

“I know… how it sounds. But I saw him, in the hallway before the assembly, and I think he might have been in my room too.”

“Like… a ghost?” Jared asked, like Connor was in the slow class and had just said something unbelievably stupid.

Connor nodded.

“Okay, no. This is fucking insane, goodbye Connor thanks for the weird—”

“I’m not fucking joking!” Connor blocked off the door with his arm, and Jared became genuinely afraid. Connor’s hair had fallen in his face, making him look like a demon or an escaped asylum patient, and he was shaking. “I saw him, and I know what I saw.”

“All right Connor, just take it down a notch, okay?” Jared backed away back into the closet, hands up in front of his chest. “I believe you, you saw Evan, sure. No problem.”

“You’re lying,” Connor muttered, but he didn’t seem too hurt. “I wouldn’t believe me either.”

“No, it sounds perfectly logical. Just a ghost, that only you can see. Makes total sense.”

“I don’t think that I can see him anymore,” Connor said, missing or just ignoring the sarcasm. “I don’t know what happened. He was in my room… I think. But I can’t remember what happened afterwards, and I haven’t seen him around since then.”

“Connor, you were _hallucinating_. That’s what happens when you take too many drugs and your brain goes loopy.”

“It wasn’t a hallucination. I just need to figure out what to do to see him again…”

“Have you tried going outside and calling ‘here ghostie ghostie?’”

“Shut up Kleinman. Maybe if I just—” Then, suddenly, he stood straight up where he was, his eyes brightening. “Punch me.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“You said he likes helping other people. Maybe he’ll come if I get hurt.”

“I’m not going to fucking punch you!”

“I won’t do anything to you! I swear to God; I just want to know that I’m not crazy. Punch me.”

“I—I—”

“For fucks sake Jared. You hate me already, now you get to show it. It’s a dream come true.”

“I don’t _hate_ you, I just—”

“The Star Wars prequels are better than the original trilogy.”

Jared punched him.

And honestly, it felt kind of good.

“Jesus fuck, Kleinman! That hurt!”

“What did you expect?” Jared’s knuckles stung like a motherfucker, but he wasn’t about to give Connor the satisfaction of knowing that.

“A little warning?” Connor grumbled, rubbing his face. Then he froze, skin going pale. “Evan?” He took a step forward. “Jared, he’s right there!”

Jared felt a surge of hope in his chest. He hadn’t realized until that moment how much he wanted to see Evan again, to say all the goodbyes had never gotten the chance to give, to redeem himself for treating him like shit for so many years. Maybe this could be his second chance. But when he turned to follow Connor’s gaze, his heart sank.

Connor was talking to a pile of deflated basketballs. There was absolutely nothing there. A nasty taste filled Jared’s mouth, and he cursed himself. How could he have let himself believe in this?

“You need help Murphy,” he spat out, trying to push down the wave of emotions clawing at his throat. “Next time you want to go schizo, leave me the fuck out of it.” He shoved Connor aside and stormed out of the closet without looking back. His eyes were watering and by the time he got to the bathroom he could barely hold back his sobs.

He didn’t know why he was crying. It was all just so fucking terrible, and Evan was gone forever and that was never going to change. No matter how many whackjobs tried to convince him otherwise, there was no getting back his bes—his family friend. He fell out of a tree and the rest of his life had gotten wiped away.

The door to the bathroom opened and Jared cupped his mouth to keep quiet. The last thing he needed was for someone to find him here and tell the school. His nonentity of a reputation was the only thing protecting him.

“Jared?”

Fuck, it was Connor.

“Fuck off,” Jared said from the stall, frantically trying to dry off his face.

“I told you I’m not fucking crazy.” Connor seemed pissed off again, which was just perfect. He’d probably rip up the whole bathroom to get at Jared.

“No, not crazy at all. Just hallucinating dead teenagers.”

“I can prove it.”

Jared paused. “How?”

The other side of the stall door was quiet for a moment, then Connor started talking again.

“You’ve gone to a summer camp called Camp Shalom since you were 12. You play a lot of Call of Duty. Your best subject is math. You’re good with computers. You always smelled like pee in kindergarten because you were afraid there were piranhas in the toilets. Your mom’s name is Kate and she met Evan’s mom in college. Do I need to go on?”

Jared opened the stall door and stared at Connor. He felt almost violated, having his life reflected back to him by a near total stranger. It was so uncomfortable that it almost made him believe Connor was telling the truth. But it didn’t change the fact that ghosts didn’t exist.

“You could have just looked that up, or asked somebody about me. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Do I look like I care that much?”

“I don’t fucking know. But it can’t be a ghost.”

Connor paused, like he was listening to something, and Jared got a prickling feeling in his scalp. The whole thing was fucking creepy.

“You were playing Overwatch when your mom came in and told you Evan died. You kept playing after, but you turned it off because you kept losing, and then you lay on your bed and went on Facebook but you scrolled too fast to even read anything. At the visitation, you were wearing a black suit jacket that was too small for you and Nike socks because you couldn’t find any nicer ones. When you went up to the coffin, you just stood there for a minute then you ran to the bathroom and you cried. Your mom found you and asked if you were okay and you said you wanted to leave. You—”

“Okay!” Jared looked at Connor, practically shaking. “Fine. I believe you. Just… stop.”

Connor looked at Jared, eyes wide. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Jared muttered, brushing it off. He scrambled to get his thoughts together again, to scrape out a quip. “I just didn’t expect Casper to start emotionally blackmailing me.”

“He’s offended by that.”

Jared half-smiled. “Where is he? Right now?”

Connor pointed to Jared’s left, and Jared looked over. He tried to picture Evan standing there in front of the stall doors, wearing his go to outfit or maybe his park rangers uniform, folded over himself with anxiety. For a moment, Jared was sure that Evan was looking right at him, and he shivered.

“This is fucking weird.”

“Agreed.”

Jared tried to think what to say, what he wanted to convey to Evan, but it just felt so wrong to tell Connor the most personal pieces of his relationship. Suddenly, he felt a surge of anger that he wasn’t the one who could see Evan, that it was a total stranger instead who had barely even spoken to him.

“Are you okay?” Connor asked.

Jared opened his mouth to respond, but the bell rang and cut him off. “I—I have to go to class.”

“Jesus, Kleinman, it’s one class. It’s not going to kill you to miss it.”

“I have a test in calculus,” Jared argued. “Just—give me your phone number. We need to talk.”

“Right, because that’s we can’t do that right now.”

“Calculus test,” Jared repeated, handing Connor his phone. As soon as Connor was done, he said a quick goodbye and left the bathroom. It felt slightly better to be out of the nasty-smelling, ghost infected atmosphere, but he still had Evan in his mind, as though he were haunting his thoughts.

Jared headed down the hallway towards his calculus class, but veered away from the classroom to the library. They gave you a permanent hall pass to the library if you were in any AP’s, which had always struck him as strange (enabling class cutting?) but he was thankful for it now.

He took a seat at a table in the very back of the library and pulled out some paper. There wasn’t a clear idea in his head of what to say but as soon as he touched pencil to paper the words just came.

_Dear Evan Hansen,_

_We’re friends. I didn’t ever say it and I wish I had. We’re family friends and we’re friends and it honestly is the same fucking thing. I was so stupid, and I’m sorry. I treated you like shit because I didn’t realize what I had until it was gone. You’re the only person who’s always been there for me and I couldn’t do that for you. I just made fun of you and then left you for other people. But now that you’re not here anymore, I don’t care about trying to impress or fit in with those people. I had a friend and he died. And I know you’re going to feel guilty when you read that, but it wasn’t your fault. It was the universe, or karma or the tree or something. It just sucks. But I’m sorry Evan. I wish you were still here._

Jared left it unsigned. At the end of the day he slipped it into Connor Murphy’s locker, and then drove home in silence. He didn’t feel much like talking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading. The voice in this piece just keeps getting less and less consistent whoops. I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish because school is starting and there's the 6 APs and junior year and I'm going to have 0 time on my hands, but if I do get any chances to write, I'll be sure to post the chapters here. But it won't be quick.  
> Leave a comment if you want! I'm interested in your thoughts about the characterization here.


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